[Mb-civic] What's Needed From Hamas - Henry A. Kissinger - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

What's Needed From Hamas
Steps in the Peace Process Must Match Conditions on the Ground

By Henry A. Kissinger
Monday, February 27, 2006; A15

The image of Ariel Sharon lying comatose in an Israeli hospital has a 
haunting quality. There is the poignancy of the warrior who fought -- 
occasionally ruthlessly -- in all of Israel's wars, incapacitated when 
he was on the verge of proclaiming a dramatic reappraisal of Israel's 
approach to peace. And, there is the prospect that this combative 
general has transcended his implacable past to show both sides the 
sacrifice needed for a serious peace process.

A serious peace process assumes a reciprocal willingness to compromise. 
But traditional diplomacy works most effectively when there is a general 
agreement on goals; a minimum condition is that both sides accept each 
other's legitimacy, that the right of the parties to exist is taken for 
granted.

Such a reciprocal commitment has been lacking between Israel and the 
Palestinians. Until the Oslo agreement of 1993, Israel refused to deal 
with the Palestine Liberation Organization because its charter required 
the elimination of Israel and its policies included frequent recourse to 
terrorism. After Oslo, Israel was prepared to negotiate with the PLO, 
but only over autonomy of the occupied territories, not sovereignty. 
After Ariel Sharon became prime minister in 2001, he unexpectedly came 
to accept the emergence of a Palestinian state, first as a necessity, 
ultimately as an Israeli strategic requirement. At the moment of his 
illness, he was preparing to create the objective conditions for such an 
outcome through unilateral Israeli actions, including withdrawals from 
Gaza and major portions of the West Bank.

The Palestinians have yet to make a comparable adjustment. Even 
relatively conciliatory Arab statements, such as the Beirut summit 
declaration of 2003, reject Israel's legitimacy as inherent in its 
sovereignty; they require the fulfillment of certain prior conditions. 
Almost all official and semi-official Arab and Palestinian media and 
schoolbooks present Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist interloper in 
the region.

The emergence of Hamas as the dominant faction in Palestine should not 
be treated as a radical departure. Hamas represents the mind-set that 
prevented the full recognition of Israel's legitimacy by the PLO for all 
these decades, kept Yasser Arafat from accepting partition of Palestine 
at Camp David in 2000, produced two intifadas and consistently supported 
terrorism. Far too much of the debate within the Palestinian camp has 
been over whether Israel should be destroyed immediately by permanent 
confrontation or in stages in which occasional negotiations serve as 
periodic armistices. The reaction of the PLO's Fatah to the Hamas 
electoral victory has been an attempt to outflank Hamas on the radical 
side. Only a small number of moderates have accepted genuine and 
permanent coexistence.

This is why, heretofore, even seeming compromises were attainable only 
by verbal gymnastics using adjectives that kept the content capable of 
incompatible interpretations. The treatment of the refugee issue in the 
"road map" is a good example. It calls for an "agreed, just, fair, and 
realistic solution." To the Palestinians, "fair and just" signifies a 
return of refugees to all parts of former Palestine, including the 
current territory of Israel, thereby swamping it. To the Israelis, the 
phrase implies that returning refugees should settle on Palestinian 
territory only.

The advent of Hamas brings us to a point where the peace process must be 
brought into some conformity with conditions on the ground. The old game 
plan that Palestinian elections would produce a moderate secular partner 
cannot be implemented with Hamas in the near future. What would be 
needed from Hamas is an evolution comparable to Sharon's. The magnitude 
of that change is rarely adequately recognized. For most of his career, 
Sharon's strategic goal was the incorporation of the West Bank into 
Israel by a settlement policy designed to prevent Palestinian 
self-government over significant contiguous territory. In his 
indefatigable pursuit of this objective, Sharon became a familiar figure 
on his frequent visits to America, with maps of his strategic concept 
rolled up under his arms to brief his interlocutors.

Late in life, Sharon, together with a growing number of his compatriots, 
concluded that ruling the West Bank would deform Israel's historic 
objective. Instead of creating a Jewish homeland, the Jewish population 
would, in time, become a minority. The coexistence of two states in 
Palestinian territory had become imperative. Under Sharon, Israel seemed 
prepared to withdraw from close to 95 percent of West Bank territory, to 
abandon a significant percentage of the settlements -- many of them 
placed there by Sharon -- involving the movement of tens of thousands of 
settlers into pre-1967 Israel, and to compensate Palestinians for the 
retained territory by some equivalent portions of Israeli territory. 
Significant percentages of Israelis are prepared to add the Arab part of 
Jerusalem to such a settlement as the possible capital of a Palestinian 
state.

Progress has been prevented in large measure by the rigid insistence on 
the 1967 frontiers and the refugee issue -- both unfulfillable 
preconditions. The 1967 lines were established as demarcation lines of 
the 1948 cease-fire. Not a single Arab state accepted Israel as 
legitimate within these lines or was prepared to treat the dividing 
lines as an international border at that time. A return to the 1967 
lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be 
such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.

The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs 
around Jerusalem -- a demand President Bush has all but endorsed -- for 
some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab 
populations. The rejection of such an approach, or alternative available 
concepts, which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic 
balance, reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently 
open.

So far Hamas has left no ambiguity about its intentions, and it will 
clearly form the next government in the territories. A serious, 
comprehensive negotiation is therefore impossible unless Hamas crosses 
the same conceptual Rubicon Sharon did. And, as with Sharon, this may 
not happen until Hamas is convinced there is no alternative strategy -- 
a much harder task since the Sharon view is, in its essence, secular, 
while the Hamas view is fueled by religious conviction.

Hamas may in time accept institutionalized coexistence because Israel is 
in a position to bring about unilaterally much of the outcome described 
here. In principle, there would be much to be said for a comprehensive 
negotiation, especially if the United States plays a leading role and if 
other members of the "quartet" -- the United Nations, Europe and Russia 
-- that drafted the road map appreciate the outer limits of flexibility. 
It requires above all a Palestinian leadership going beyond anything 
heretofore shown and a willingness by moderate Arabs to face down their 
radical wing and make themselves responsible for a moderate, secular 
solution.

The danger of a final-status negotiation is that absent a firm prior 
agreement among the quartet, it might shade into an incendiary effort to 
impose terms on Israel incompatible with its long-term security and 
inconsistent with the parameters established by President Bill Clinton 
at Camp David and in his speech of January 2001 and by President Bush in 
his letter to Sharon in April 2004. Final-status negotiations in present 
conditions would probably founder on the underlying challenge described 
earlier: Do the parties view this as a step toward coexistence or as a 
stage toward final victory?

Does this mean the end of all diplomacy? Whatever happens, whoever 
governs Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the parties will be 
impelled by their closeness to one another to interact on a range of 
issues including crossing points, work permits and water usage. These de 
facto relationships might be shaped into some agreed international 
framework, in the process testing Hamas's claims of a willingness to 
discuss a truce. A possible outcome of such an effort could be an 
interim agreement of indefinite duration. Both sides would suspend some 
of their most intractable claims on permanent borders, on refugees and 
perhaps on the final status of the Arab part of Jerusalem. Israel would 
withdraw to lines based on the various formulas evolved since Camp David 
and endorsed by American presidents. It would dismantle settlements 
beyond the established dividing line. The Hamas-controlled government 
would be obliged to renounce violence. It would also need to agree to 
adhere to agreements previously reached by the PLO. A security system 
limiting military forces on the soil of the emerging Palestinian state 
would be established. State-sponsored propaganda to undermine the 
adversary would cease.

Such a long-term interim understanding would build on the precedent of 
the Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement, which has regulated the 
deployment of forces in the Golan Heights since 1974 amid disputes on a 
variety of other issues and Syria's failure to recognize Israel.

Whether Hamas can be brought to such an outcome or any negotiated 
outcome depends on unity among the quartet and, crucially, on the 
moderate Arab world. It also remains to be seen whether the Israeli 
government emerging from the March 28 elections will have Sharon's 
prestige and authority to preserve Sharon's strategy, to which the 
acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has committed himself. A diplomatic 
framework is needed within which Israel can carry out those parts of the 
road map capable of unilateral implementation, and the world community 
can strive for an international status that ends violence while leaving 
open the prospect of further progress toward permanent peace.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/26/AR2006022601263.html
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